


i'll be your sky

by ghiblitears



Series: leave me your stardust [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Family Bonding, Ficlet Collection, Fluff, Gen, a family can be a paladin his mom and a cosmic wolf, memory sharing, snapshots from the two year space whale trip
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-05-27 01:26:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 6,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15013676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghiblitears/pseuds/ghiblitears
Summary: He'd been angry at their time cut short as a kid. Now it seems they have all the time in the world.(Keith, Krolia, and some of their time in the quantum abyss)





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Voltron s6 gave me two years of family bonding with my favourite Galra mom and her half Galra kid? Of course I'm gonna write that.
> 
> These will be on the shorter side, and I've got a handful of scenes to post over the next couple days. After those run out, we'll see where things go.
> 
> Could be considered a follow-up to leave me your stardust, and I've kept Keith's dad's name from that.
> 
> Thanks for reading!

After what feels like an eternity running, Keith finds waiting to be a completely foreign idea.

 

There’s nothing for them to do until they reach the quantum abyss —nothing except wait on this living island until they get close enough to go through. The space around their path only seems dark because of how bright their target is, even as the rest of the dark sky shines with stars. The abyss crosses the horizon line, fills Keith’s vision until it burns afterimages into his eyes. Like looking into a fire. Like staring into the sun.

 

When he looks back, blinking spots away, Krolia is watching. Her mask hides her face, leaving him to wonder what she’s thinking of. In the wake of their trip so far, it could be anything. He goes to say something and then falters slightly, unsure of how to proceed — with the mission, with their survival, with _her_ — and hopes she doesn’t notice.

 

He’d been angry at their time cut short as a kid. Now, waiting, it seems they have all the time in the world.

 

Krolia looks away and turns her attention to scope out their surroundings. The space whale (Keith doesn’t know what it’s actually called, so it’s stuck with ‘space whale’ until they can come up with something better) is unlike anything he’s ever seen; greenery spreads across the creature’s surface as far as he can see, actual plants and flora that must somehow survive on its’ back. Gentle clicks and hums chatter out of the brush and reach his ears through his helmet — animal calls. Signs of life, so starkly audible in the lifelessness of space. It seems impossible. Poetic, even. Out of everything he’s already seen today, a thriving ecosystem atop a space whale is the strangest.

 

Okay, _might_ be the strangest. He’s got a lot on his plate at the moment.

 

Krolia begins to walk. He follows.

 

“This... actually looks kind of promising,” Keith comments after a while. It’s strange that they _can_ walk — it means that the space whale is large enough to generate its own gravitational pull. Another tick on the ‘weird’ checklist. “Better than walking there, anyway.”

 

“We should find somewhere to rest,” Krolia says. She sighs, crossing her arms in one tired motion. “I don’t know how long we’ll be here. We may as well make ourselves comfortable.”

 

At her tone, unease settles in the pit of his stomach. How long _could_ they be here? Weeks? Months?

 

Years?

 

Keith doesn’t want to think about that. Time dilation theory already makes his head hurt. For the tenth time since they landed, he wishes they still had a ship.

 

Krolia glances back as they walk. Her face is still masked, but he can imagine the look of concern she must be sporting underneath. “Are you doing alright?” she asks.

 

“I’m fine, Krolia,” he says immediately. It feels like a lie, though it isn’t. He’s about as fine as he can be between the memories that crest continually over him and the space whale. He sees the subtle drop in her shoulders before she turns back to their path.

 

Because it’s ‘Krolia’. Not ‘mom’, not yet. And, well, maybe not ever.

 

It’s not that he’s holding anything against her. It’s that he can already see that the adjustment period for them is going to be... complicated. Understandably so. It would be hard enough without all the other stuff going on — discovering his disappeared mother isn’t actually dead after a lifetime of him believing it is a hell of a lot to take in. That’s on top of fighting in the middle of a galactic war, their current situation’s recurring glimpses into the past, and their strange, new surroundings. But all of that aside, mostly Keith isn’t used to being mothered.

 

On one hand, he’s nineteen, and has been eking out his own life alone since he was a kid. Keith’s used to independence, used to relying on his own strengths because that used to be all he had. On the other hand, he wants nothing more than to just stop resisting and let it happen. To give into Krolia’s attempts to care for him, because it feels like they’re making up for lost time.

 

It’s these two mindsets that pull him apart, and if there’s a right answer Keith doesn’t know it yet.

 

Maybe once they reach the abyss he’ll have it figured out.


	2. II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't get the mental image of this one out of my head. Maybe I'm the only person who'll find it funny.

Nights on the space whale island don’t align exactly due to time dilation, so they reconfigure Krolia’s suit’s technology to calibrate days. Their position to the abyss is so slow as to be almost unchanging. The first few ‘days’ pass quickly as they explore their surroundings and start to make camp, and they sleep in shifts — a habit for both of them, it turns out.

 

By the fifth day they’ve managed to locate a source of water and rig a trapping system to catch food. The space whale’s ecosystem teems with life; they were incredibly lucky to find it, and even luckier to find themselves to be the ecosystem’s the apex predators so far. Though they haven’t explored very much of the ecosystem, yet; the creature’s the size of a small country, and they’re still cautious about being able to find their way back to the camp. In time, Keith thinks, maybe they’ll discover they’re not as alone as they think.

 

Their trapping setup is a series of fairly basic snares, albeit a brutal type that snaps the neck of the prey once caught.  Keith winces the first time one goes off, cutting off an animal mid-screech. But it’s the alternative to starvation, so he puts his discomfort aside and goes to work stoking the fire. Once the flame kicks up he sits back and wipes sweat from his forehead, grateful that they don’t have to wear their helmets constantly. Breathable air — what a concept.

 

Their prize today is a small rodent-type animal. On Earth it might have been classified as a rabbit, but there’s room for debate. It’s one of hundreds in a colony not far from their camp, and they take reassurance in the fact that they probably won’t go hungry in the time it takes to reach the abyss.

 

The meal is... okay. It’s fine, really. Keith considers making a comment about the meat tasting like chicken (which, in all honesty, it does, and it’s kind of messing with him), but decides it would probably be wasted on Krolia. Her knowledge of Earth has leaps and gaps in it thanks to how brief her life there was.  Maybe someday.

 

It’s an odd concept. It sticks in his mind like a bruise; something he can ignore if he needs to, but gains his attention immediately if he pokes at it. Krolia was on Earth long enough to have a child — that much he can tell from what the time abyss gives him — but he has no idea what she learned in that time. Did she meet anyone else on Earth? Did she read books? Study human technology? The memories so far have shown that most of her time was spent guarding the Blue Lion and keeping the Galra at bay. That doesn’t leave a lot of free time to explore, or to learn.

 

And what free time she did have, she probably spent with his dad...

 

Eugh. There’s a thought.

 

Keith only realizes he’s making a face when Krolia looks at him and raises an eyebrow. He’s never been more grateful that his mother can’t read his mind.

 

“It’s that bad, huh?” she asks, gesturing to her own meal. “I mean, it’s kind of stringy, but...”

 

“No, it’s great,” he replies. Takes another bite, for good measure. “Better than starving.”

 

She shrugs. “It’s fine. Tastes kind of like chicken.”

 

Keith chokes on his food.


	3. III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's the last of the first update! i'll probably post the next one on sunday. enjoy!

Something has started to watch them. Keith doesn’t know what it is until he catches a glimpse of black and blue fur and a plumed tail slinking into the brush, and then it clicks. Its yellow eyes track his every movement, darting through the undergrowth that borders their camp, circling them. It hasn’t done much more than that. Sometimes he can hear it howl.

 

Krolia notices it too. She’s the one who starts leaving scraps out, and Keith quickly joins in the practice. It’s been weeks since they saw the meteorite fall and followed it to encounter their first competition on the space whale; a pair of alien creatures with hungry maws and sharp, claw-like appendages. They’d turned their attention to Keith and Krolia and apparently figured they were a better catch, because they’d found themselves on the business end of their claws. Thankfully the beasts had been easy enough to take down.

 

Keith and Krolia had left the wolf-like creature alone. Apparently it had become their shadow.

 

It starts gradually creeping closer into their camp — first its black nose, then its yellow eyes, and then its wolfish head peeks through the brush to observe them before darting back in. The scraps of food they leave around camp begin to disappear, and then the ones they start throwing in its direction. It takes another week before the wolf finally snatches a piece of food out of Keith’s waiting hands. It backtracks immediately, ears flat against its head, and then abruptly teleports back into the overgrowth.

 

 _That’s_ a surprise. Even Krolia looks startled.

 

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” she says. Her wide yellow eyes follow the wolf’s path through the bushes.

 

“Me neither.”

 

“See if you can lure it out again.”

 

“Why?”

 

“I have a program on my gauntlet that can analyze it. Tell us what it is.” She taps her wrist, which pulls up a holographic display. “I’m trying to make a log of the ecosystem on this creature.”

 

Keith eyes the spot where the wolf — space wolf? — disappeared. “I don’t think it wants to.”

 

She follows his gaze before swiping the holoscreen away. “It’ll come back.”

 

Keith hopes it will. It seems to want to trust them. The fact that it’s a teleporting space wolf makes it that much better.  


In the meantime, there’s plenty to do around camp. Clear the brush, gather firewood, check the snares, go explore just a little further than where they’ve gone so far — there’s a never-ending to-do list.

 

Today’s task is to fix one of the snares. One of the sticks that makes up the snare’s base has snapped, leaving it unusable until it’s replaced. An easy enough job, but one that requires concentration; if the base doesn’t keep its hold when he ties it back together, it’s going to collapse. He sits cross-legged on the ground and goes to disassemble the snare, tugging loose the knots that keep it together until his fingers ache.

 

Between tasks, Keith tries to keep himself occupied, or tries to rest. It reminds him weirdly of being back in the desert and searching for the Blue Lion, now tangled up in the visions he’s seen from the quantum abyss. Back then he was constantly working; there was energy to track, the house to continually repair, radio signals to intercept, stars to chart — that sort of thing. Letting his mind wander too long had lead to some truly terrible nights, when the weight of his actions would crash down and leave him feeling helpless. Staying busy and working until exhaustion caught up with him had helped chase those dark thoughts away.  


It’s been a long time since he was allowed to just sit back and think. The concept still sort of scares him, but this time he’s trying to be mindful of the silence.

 

He’s so caught up in his thoughts and with fixing the snare that he ignores his surroundings completely, and only takes notice of them again when Krolia hisses to him;

 

“Keith, don’t move!”

 

A snuffling sound makes itself known just behind his right ear. He freezes completely, holds the snare’s pieces in a death grip and slows his breathing.

 

After what seems like an eternity (and in the time abyss, it could be), a wet nose pushes itself against the side of his face. The wolf makes a low sound in its throat as it sniffs him — not quite a growl; it sounds more inquisitive, the dog version of a ‘hmmm?’. Keith dares to look back, and the wolf’s glowing eyes meet his. The creature’s ears prick up and forward, and it leans in to sniff the rest of his face, pushing his bangs aside with its nose.

 

An electronic chirp grabs the wolf’s attention, and it lets loose a surprised-sounding yap before teleporting back into the bushes. Krolia lowers her gauntlet, smiling.

 

“Got it,” she says, smug.

 

When Keith wakes the next morning, the wolf is curled up at his back, and he’s quietly thrilled.


	4. IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sunday update! Thanks to everyone who's commented/hit kudos/reblogged this :)  
> This was the first scene I envisioned when I started writing. I love space wolf, I can't wait to learn her canon name.

“Fen?” Krolia echoes, tilting her head slightly. She watches the cosmic wolf flit playfully around the campsite with a curious stare.  
  
Fen, it turned out, did not know how to fetch, and she seemed unwilling to learn how. Keith had learned that her favourite game was tag, and that usually meant he was the target. He’d dodge and weave through the overgrowth while she did her best to catch him. Her energy was boundless, meaning it was on him to make the game a challenge. It was fun on both sides, even if Fen cheated — which she usually did. She liked to clip through space-time to trip him, which usually left him in his current position; flat on his back against the ground and pinned beneath her surprising weight, dodging her enthusiastic licks and kisses with cries of “Down, Fen! Yeah, you won, now get off!”

 

Krolia’s animal-identifying program had given them a name in an alien language that Keith couldn’t read. They’d fiddled with his gauntlet’s settings and discovered that he could set the language to ‘Terran’, and that it could spit out actual scientific names for everything they encountered — whoever had programmed that in had some serious foresight. According to it, Fen is a _Canis spectrum_. He makes a mental note to show it to the team when he gets back.

 

Fen finally relents, rolling off Keith to take off back into the brush. He groans and pushes himself up onto his elbows. ( _How does one cosmic wolf pup weigh so much_? he wonders). Keith turns his attention back to Krolia, who’s looks like she’s trying to figure out the answer to a puzzle.

 

“That’s what you named her?” she asks.

 

“Yeah. I got tired of calling her Hey You.” He stands and heads over to join Krolia at their campfire, grimacing at the soreness in his limbs. Fen had caught by teleporting right under his feet to trip him onto the hard ground. He’ll be bruised tomorrow. Worth it.

 

“I see,” she says, following Fen’s path with her eyes. “Does it mean anything?”

 

“It’s short for Fenris,” he says, brushing dirt off his Marmora suit. “It’s an old Earth myth. A Norse wolf that was supposedly going to help start the end of the world.”

 

Krolia raises an eyebrow. “Really?”

 

He shrugs. “It was in a book I read once. I thought the name was cool, and it kind of fit.”

 

If his mother could look any more unimpressed, _he’d_ be impressed. “You named your pet after a doomsday-causing myth?”

 

Keith scowls and crosses his arms. “You wanted to name me _Yorak_. You don’t get to judge what I name my wolf.”

 

Krolia flushes — actually flushes, although instead of turning red she simply turns a darker shade of purple — and mirrors his gesture, crossing her own arms authoritatively. “Yorak is a perfectly respectable Galra name!”

 

“That you were ready to give to your human kid!” Keith accuses, although he can’t quite hide his grin. This conversation is absurd, but it’s funny to watch her get so worked up. Krolia flips mostly between serious and soft — ‘flustered’ is a new one.

 

She’s also apparently holding back her amusement, because after a moment Krolia laughs.

 

“Your father wouldn’t let me either. It was probably for the best,” she admits. She points to Fen. “Maybe _she_ should be Yorak.”

 

“She already responds to ‘Fen’. I’m not renaming her.”

 

They’re interrupted by Fen’s reappearance, which startles both of them as she teleports to the camp. They’ll probably never not be caught off-guard by that. She bounds over to Keith and drops into a play-bow, her glowing eyes inviting him to go on another sprint through the trees.

 

“No, Fen, we’re done. You already got me good.” He reaches over and pushes her gently out of the bow. She tilts her head as if to say ‘Really? That’s it?’ before jumping back up.

 

She sneezes once, and then shakes her whole body. Keith takes the ‘sneeze-and-shake’ she does after playing as a signal that she’s ready to calm down, because she does it every single time without fail. Whether that’s normal dog behaviour or something exclusive to teleporting space wolves, he’s not sure. She pads up and walks in a circle before settling down with her head on his leg.

 

He’s glad the Marmoran suit is at least sort of waterproof. Fen drools.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My dog does the 'sneeze-and-shake' too, so naturally I had to incorporate it.  
> Fen's best quality: her wiggles.


	5. V

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to everyone who's commented/reblogged/kudos'd so far! this chapter is a bit shorter, and then a heads up that i'll be moving on sunday and then heading off on vacation for a couple weeks after that. to make up for it, i'll be posting a MONSTER scene (the longest I've written by far) that's entirely self-indulgent whump on monday.  
> thanks for reading!

Dawn is just starting to spill over the campsite when Keith wakes one morning. Acrid smoke stings his nose and eyes and he drags a hand over them in an effort to keep it out. The ground is cool and damp, and as he rises back into consciousness the sound of falling rain reaches his ears.

 

He’s surprised to find Fen gone from her usual position at his back. Normally she took to the spot as soon as he lay down for the night. Her presence had grown to be a comfort — even though he and Krolia had abandoned their joint habit of sleeping in shifts, Fen would seemingly keep a lookout, curling up beside Keith with her nose peeking out above her plumed tail. They both sleep easier knowing that someone else will watch their backs.

 

Getting up seems ten times harder than usual. Keith had been caught up in some weird dreams last night, falling half in and out of them until he’d finally woken up. He can only recall bits and pieces — he remembers racing down a Galra cruiser’s interior; standing at the foot of a valley in Earth’s red, dusty desert; gasping for breath in the dark, continuous room where he went through the Trials of Marmora way back when — but he’s too tired to try and stick them together into any kind of order.

 

The first thing he notices is the thin line of smoke rising out of the now-dead campfire. It must have gone out overnight. The second thing is that Krolia is sitting at the edge of the camp and watching the rain gently fall. Fen is curled up at her side, her head nestled on Krolia’s lap. As he watches, Krolia reaches up to rub a hand over her eyes.

 

She looks tired.

 

She’d been stoking the fire last night when he’d fallen asleep, so he's surprised to find her already awake. Maybe she hadn’t kicked the habit after all.

 

Keith pulls himself into a sitting positions and calls to her; “Krolia?”

 

She startles when he speaks. Fen wakes as well, raising her head towards the source of the noise. But she doesn’t move — she seems unwilling to get up and leave Krolia.

 

Krolia glances back to him. There’s a sadness in her eyes that never really leaves, something resembling atonement in the way she looks at him. Part of that probably comes from leaving him; the rest he can’t figure out yet. Maybe from bringing him into this situation, where they haven’t found an end or a plan yet that leads them beyond the quantum abyss. Or maybe it’s that she’d done her best to keep him out of the war, and here he is anyway. Neither of those things are her fault, but he can see why she’d think so. They’re still figuring things out. Still trying to find understanding.

 

When she looks to him this time her face is twisted with grief, her eyes shining with the remnants of tears.

 

He’s so surprised it takes a moment for him to say anything else. “What —?”

 

Then he’s caught in an embrace. Krolia closes the gap in an instant, pulling him into her arms as easily as if he were still a child. She draws in a shuddering breath as he freezes up, unsure of what to do on contact. The hug is firm, protective, apologetic. It’s like she’s shielding him again from the memory flashes but this time nothing else happens, nothing except the gentle rise of daylight and the soft fall of rain.

 

“I’m sorry,” she breathes, clinging to him. “Your father — I didn’t know —“

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

She pulls back and looks at him, her hands still firm on his shoulders. “You never should have gone through that alone. If I’d known that Heath was gone —“ She draws in another choked breath. Emotions catch the last word and make it come out quieter than the rest.

 

And suddenly Keith knows why he had such strange dreams, and what Krolia saw in the abyss.


	6. VI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is not the whump prompt. I realized on the plane to Hawaii that i’d completely forgotten to post it, but I did have this prompt kicking around in my phone, and I’ve been chipping away at it for the past week or so. I hope you like it anyway!
> 
> Also, don’t think too hard about the math in this chapter re: Galra lifespans. I sure didn’t.

They build a second, smaller lean-to shelter just outside the mouth of the cave. They intended to use it to store firewood and supplies, but it becomes a kind of alcove for them to hang out in when the cave is too ... well, cave-like. Using the second shelter feels less like they’re squatting and more like they’re camping, at least in Keith’s eyes.

 

And then he smacks his head on the edge of the lean-to’s roof, and that is the catalyst in Keith’s realization that something about the whole situation has changed.

 

He swears and steps away from the offending roof, clutching his head with one hand and staring at it in shock as if it’s the first time he’s seen it. The commotion startles Fen into wakefulness from where she’d been napping in the cave. She teleports outside to stare at him. Her surprised face quickly shifts to a look of canine apathy — ‘you woke me up, you get no sympathy from me.’

 

“What the fuck?” he sputters.

 

It gets a laugh out of Krolia, who’s across the campsite and apparently been witness to the whole thing. She tips a bundle of firewood out of her arms, brushing splinters off her armour. “Betrayed by your own shelter?” she jokes.

 

“Did the lean-to fall?” He tests the wood with one hand, but it stays where it is. It’s not sagging from damage, either. But he’s never crashed into it before, even if it just barely brushed the top of his head when they’d built it. “It’s shorter than it was before.”

 

Krolia shakes her head. “The shelter hasn’t changed. You just got taller, Keith.”

 

Taller?

 

“Really?” He stands up straight in an attempt to gauge his new height against the shelter. From his perspective, it’s hard to tell. The Marmoran armour is no indicator either — it had auto adjusted to his size the first time he’d put it on. If it could calibrate that, it would explain how he’d managed to grow taller and not notice.

 

Krolia comes to stand before him. This time he can sort of notice the difference — it’s only an inch or two of height, but he now only has to crane slightly to look in her eyes, rather than all the way up.

 

“Huh.”

 

“You seem surprised,” she comments.

 

“I kinda figured I was done growing,” he replies, reaching out to touch the roof again. “But I guess not.”

 

“Most Galra continue growing into the late stages of adolescence,” Krolia says. “I was forty-six decaphoebs before I stopped.”

 

She says it casually — common knowledge, he supposes. It still bothers him that he knows almost nothing of Galra biology; he’d been too caught up in the revelation and then swept up again in their mission that he hadn’t had time to look it up. What information he had eventually found was expansive — ten thousand years of Galra conquests had lead to them settling down with the local aliens, of course — but there’d been nothing on human-Galra biology and the information was wildly conflicting as it was. Figures.

 

Decaphoebs are something like a year, if he’s recalling correctly. For once he wishes Pidge would rush in with an equation.

 

“How old are you now?”

 

“A hundred and twenty six decaphoebs,” she replies, and then smiles wryly. “Still spry for a Galra, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

 

A hundred and twenty-six?

 

Geez, Galra had long lifespans. But that explains how all the years that had passed since she’d gone to Earth didn’t seem to have made a dent in Krolia’s physical aging.

 

“So... I’m nineteen years old. Where does that put me?”

 

She hums thought fully before speaking; “A child,” she says, amusement pulling at her deadpan reply.

 

He rolls his eyes and moves to go sit by the fire. “Am I just gonna keep getting taller, then? Or is there other stuff I should be worried about?” His thoughts wander to the only other aliens he knows on a personal level — the Alteans — who have a few biological quirks of their own. A brief image flashes through his mind of the time Coran got the slipperies and he shudders involuntarily. Hopefully the Galran side effects of aging would skip over him the way most other things had.

 

Well, it’s not like humans were exempt from weird biological stuff. It’s just that he knows about those. That’s what he tells himself, anyways.

 

She shrugs. “Alien physiologies present themselves in a number of ways across species. You could develop a Galran complexion, or grow fangs, or your eyes could change colour, or you could get a sudden case of the Violet Spots...”

 

He must make a truly spectacular face at her nonchalant list, because she laughs again. “I’m kidding. Any true Galran traits you’d have should have shown themselves in your adolescence. You’re in the clear on that front.”

 

That’s a relief, sort of. It explains his sudden growth spurt as just a natural human trait, if anything.

 

Krolia watches him thoughtfully, her head tilted and her eyes crinkled with amusement. She reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear; it had gotten longer since they’d arrived. “Imagine my surprise when you were born looking entirely human.”

 

“Must’ve been weird for you,” he says. “But it probably made things easier. I couldn’t exactly stick around if I looked like you.”

 

It strikes him in the moment just how different his life could have been. He could have gone with her, never knowing Earth, never going to the Garrison, never knowing his father. He could have grown up as a rebel from the beginning, the war ingrained in his bones and running through his veins.

 

Would he have been a paladin? Would he have met the others at all?

 

Her eyes turn sad. “Easier in some ways, yes.”

 

‘Not always’ remains unspoken, but Keith hears it in her words anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Krolia. You really don’t know how Galra your hybrid son really is...


	7. VII

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this very different chapter was inspired by [this heartbreaking post](http://ace-pidge.tumblr.com/post/176005767816/so-we-like-to-joke-that-galra-are-like-super) written by ace-pidge! all inspiration credit/feels should really go to her. I'm just the fic writer *shrugs*
> 
> also I've jumped on the 'canon' bandwagon that Keith's dad is named Heath, so I'll be going through and editing the chapters to reflect this.
> 
> <3
> 
> (cw for implications of past miscarriage/implicit discussion of abortion)

The dying sun drags itself to where they sit on the porch steps. Krolia looks out over the horizon with Heath next to her, one of his hands tangled in hers. The tire swing in the tree sways in the barest of breezes, casting a long and winding shadow on the earth below.

 

It’s a long time before either of them says anything.

 

“We can’t do this again,” Krolia says. Her voice is heavy, tired, sad. Her free hand is wrapped around herself, crossing her body in a protective gesture. She exhales in a shuddering sigh, the only thing that breaks the silence until she speaks again;

 

“I think I should go,” she continues. Her eyes go skyward as if searching the stars for answers. “Leave this place.”

 

He looks shocked. “No.”

 

“Yes, Heath,” she insists. When she turns to him the red sky lights up the tear tracks down her face. “I don’t want this to keep happening — this trap of hoping for the best and losing it. It’s terrible. It _hurts_. You deserve better. You deserve someone —“ Her voice catches painfully. “Someone else.”

 

“Someone human, you mean?” Heath asks, quiet as the dust and wind that skitters across the ground. His hand squeezes Krolia’s. “If I’d wanted any of that, I’d have gone to find it by now.”

 

There’s a pause before he continues; “I want you. I want _this_.”

 

“This —” Her hand fists in the fabric of her shirt. “— is not possible. I should know by now.”

 

“Have faith, Li,” he says. His other hand comes up to stroke her cheek. “This might be the one.”

 

“It won’t survive, Heath,” she says, so harshly it makes him flinch. “None of the others have. How do you know this one will be any different?”

 

Another long silence. Just beyond the borders of the house, a small stone marker stands watch. Its inscription, clogged with dust from the unyielding storms, is a nameless epitaph that encompasses the entirety of these two and their tiny world.

 

Krolia does not look at it. Heath takes a moment to see it, to silently recite the inscription he’d carved into the stone before he pulls her into an embrace.

 

“I don’t know,” he confesses.

 

She buries her head in his shoulder. “Maybe we should stop this before the worst happens again.”

 

“Stop it how? Go to a doctor?” he asks softly, without judgement. “They could take you away. Give away your cover. And I couldn’t — I don’t have the skill, and even if I did—“

 

“I know,” she says tiredly. “I know, Heath.”

 

He pulls out of the embrace, bringing a hand up to cup her jaw.

 

“We’ll do this together. All we can do is wait,” he says. “Wait and hope.”

 

By the way Krolia’s stare hardens at his words, hope doesn’t seem like an option.

 

*

 

There’s a piercing cry — a pair of tiny, new lungs take in their first breath of air — and the sound of disbelieving, relieved laughter.

 

“You did it, Li! Do you hear that?” Heath is holding the small, kicking body in shaky hands, looking down at it with eyes that shine like stars. The cries do not relent in the slightest.

 

Krolia, spent after hours of labour, still has the energy to look shocked. If anything, she seems to come to life at the wails that fill the air. “It’s—?”

 

“He,” Heath corrects, tears beginning to stream down his face. “He’s alive. He’s _perfect_.”

 

 _He_. Their child goes from being a concept to suddenly being real.

 

When Heath hands him to Krolia, he’s already got the baby in a bundle of blankets. In theory, the baby might have stopped crying at the swaddle. In reality, he seems reluctant to stop.

 

Until he settles in her arms, and then his cries finally calm to soft whimpers. It seems to click for her then, in the sudden quiet, and her look of shock falters between Heath and her son.

 

“It’s — he’s — “ Krolia, strong and smart and fierce Krolia, struggles for words. “He’s _ours_?”

 

And then, grabbed by what must have been months and months of buried emotion, Krolia cries freely, thankful, reverent that waiting and hoping finally paid off.

 

***

 

Keith surfaces from the memory like he’s a drowning man on the shore — gasping, unsteady, alive. The quantum abyss shifts beneath his feet to accommodate the time flash, and his blurry vision follows its path until it disappears over the horizon. The wave had come on suddenly while he was in the middle of gathering firewood, and his collection falls to the ground to scatter at his feet.

 

They had waited so long for a kid. For _him_. It seems unbelievable, after years and years of him thinking otherwise.

 

When he returns to camp later that day, Krolia picks up on his shift in mood.

 

“Are you alright?” she asks, settling down next to him at the fire. She casts her eyes down to Fen, laying with her head on Keith’s lap, doing her best to be comforting weight but mostly making his leg go to sleep.

 

He doesn’t mind.

 

“I’ll be okay,” he says. His fingers tangle in Fen’s teal fur. He leans into Krolia until his head rests on her shoulder. “I just have a lot on my mind.”

 

Krolia nods. She moves to hold him in a one-armed embrace, clear eyes watching the gentle dusk fall over their small home.


	8. VIII

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Season 7 spoilers in this update!

The only sounds are the rush of water, an echo of his jump, and the pop of bubbles rising past his ears.

 

Keith breaks the water’s surface and flings his head back, sending droplets flying all the way back to the shore he’d jumped from. Cool air coasts over the pool and rustles the plants at the water’s edge. A cliff overhangs the spring to leave half the spring in shadow.

 

While it rained often enough for them to have a constant supply of drinking water, they’d been hesitant to waste their source of hydration to bathe. The spring, while about a varga from their camp, solved that problem. Deep enough to be submerged in and long enough to swim laps in, it became equal parts bathtub and stress relief.

 

Now came the uncomfortable part. Stripping out of the armour in the water had been tricky at first, but he’d gotten better at it over the past few weeks. The suit completely masks how cold the spring really is, so it’s always a shock to his system once he finally manages to get it all the way off. Goosebumps prickle over his skin at the water’s icy temperature. He tosses the suit over one arm and swishes it through the spring to clean it before swimming over to prop it on the shore. That leaves him clad only in the undersuit; a thin, black, stretchy muscle shirt and shorts.

 

He takes a moment to just lie back in the water, barely needing to kick to stay afloat. Plants hang off the cliff face; bunches of thin purple fronds and bright turquoise flowers decorate the rock wall. A small stream picks its way between the rocks to fill the pool.

 

In the moment, it’s perfect. Quiet. Calm. Nothing but the rush of water and the calm wind brushing the trees. Leagues better than the upside-down Altean swimming pool, at least.

 

The time flash catches him unaware, but this time, it’s different. It’s barely even a scene — the flash just sends Keith to a dark room, cut only by a few slivers of light.

 

_Krolia stands before him, close enough to reach out and touch._

 

_He hears four words;_

_“I love you, Keith.”_

_He speaks five;_

_“I love you too, Mom.”_

 

And then he’s back in the present, staring wide-eyed into the sky and gut-punched by the aftermath.

 

When he reaches the shore he hauls himself up with trembling limbs. He takes up residence at the water’s edge, where his feet still dangle in the icy pool and his hands find purchase in the grass. Water streams off him, rolls off him in rivulets to soak into the waiting earth and rejoin the spring.

 

He stares into the calm pool and watches his reflection waver with each gentle drop.

 

Glimpses into the past always catch Keith off-guard. Even with the rest of their routine on the space whale down to a science, the time flashes always manage to turn things just a little askew — and who could blame them? The flashes are irregular, erratic, never managing to align to a pattern even as Krolia dutifully records each one.

 

Glimpses into the future are stranger still, and somehow more unnerving. Because there’s absolutely no telling when any of it will come true, if at all.

 

The future visions also don’t follow the rules of the past. Being caught in a time flash to the future puts them in the driver’s seat, to take in the new information firsthand rather than as a bystander. Keith has had several; one that has him standing on a colossal creature whose pupil-less eye spreads out from where he stands like a lake. Another has taken him face-to-face with his team, shock worn uniformly on their faces like masks. A third placed him alone in a dim, cold cell — the violet light that illuminated what little he could see of his surroundings had cut him to the bone. It was a Galra ship; that much he’d bet his life on. No other ships had that kind of glow.

 

He can’t scrub the very first one, of Shiro tearing towards him in bright light and ferocity, out of his mind no matter how hard he tries. That’s the one he insists will not come true.

 

And now this, the fifth, which he fiercely hopes will.

 

Each vision had lasted a few seconds and no more. Maybe the visions of the past were longer and more coherent because the past was already accounted for. The future still felt unsure, ever-changing, like the visions were just dots he had to connect without knowing the big picture. Regardless, Keith clings to the fractured memories the way he holds pretty much everything else in his life — tightly and without letting go.

 

He holds the words he spoke to Krolia — that he _will_ speak to Krolia — the same way.

 

There’d been sadness in those words, sadness and hope and terrible exhaustion wearing him down. And yet at those words there’d also been release. Warmth breaks in his chest at the thought.

 

They aren’t there yet. Krolia isn’t ‘mom’, not yet.  But they’re getting close. They will get there someday.

 

He knows that much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Would you believe I'd actually written a scene where Keith calls Krolia 'mom' before season 7 and the show still ended up beating me to it?  
> Regardless, I loved that moment so much I had to incorporate it anyway. So I combo'd it with a little scene I wrote while camping; I went to a provincial park in my hometown with an amazing swimming hole and waterfall, and it inspired me to write a bit.  
> I straight up sobbed while I was watching episode 5, FYI. That "I love you, mom" was everything I wanted out of these two. Anyone else? No? Just me then.


	9. IX

Krolia is alone. 

 

That by itself would be strange, but then she blinks and finds herself staring at the console of a Marmoran ship and things make even less sense. She pilots the small fighter through space without hesitation, her path sure and certain. A holoscreen appears on the dashboard before her and shows several violet markers hovering above a planet — a Galra invasion in action. They descend on their target swiftly and without mercy. 

 

She recognizes the memory flash for what it is but still finds it hard to make out details. The rest of the memory — past or present, she’s not sure just yet — seems shadowed, tapering off around the edges of her vision. A sense of urgency hangs over her and pilots her trajectory, paired with a knot of apprehension that makes its home in her sternum and continually draws her focus to the holoscreen. Those details, coupled with the burning engines and the ship streaming steadily through space, help her realize where she is. Suddenly she doesn’t have to read the name of the planet to know which one it is and to know that she needs to get there fast -- with Daibazaal eons ago and her own home planet enslaved, there’s only one other place it could be. It’s a good thing the ship’s control sticks are of industrial make, because she thinks she might have already snapped them off otherwise. 

 

Stars make paths of light through the windows, stretched across her field of vision by the ship’s movement. There’s almost no sound in the ship’s interior, just the continual hum of the engines and a steady beep that tracks how far she’s gone. No voices, no comms, nothing else. Just Krolia and her thoughts. The scenario isn’t foreign to her – with the amount of time alone she’s had since becoming a Blade, Krolia can stand the silence. But it isn’t right. She shouldn’t be alone, but she is, and somehow that makes her more uneasy than seeing destruction. 

 

A violet glow illuminates the cockpit. It takes her a moment to realize Keith’s Marmoran knife sits on the dashboard, glowing gently in the ship’s low lighting. 

 

Why does she have it? 

 

Then, to her horror, the glow stutters. 

 

Fear grips her. The violet light falters again, flickering weakly against the gloom. 

 

No. This is wrong. The knife should be with Keith and it should be strong, a beacon of light against the dark. It had responded to her in Trugg’s base, but it wasn’t hers any longer. Where it had stood as an indicator of her own mortality, now it lent its use to her son. 

 

That the glow flickers terrifies her to her core. 

 

*** 

 

The memory flash ends, a free-fall that lands heavily in reality. 

 

Krolia knows she can’t keep Keith out of danger – not in their line of work, certainly not in the fight against the Galra – but rationality only has so much say in her emotions. Memories beyond the time abyss mean that they will survive, that they will make it through this long enough to at least start to see the end of the war through, but... 

 

She instinctively folds her arms around herself. 

 

There is so much she wants to protect him from. In another life she wouldn’t have to worry about what lies in the leaps and gaps of their future-vision. In another life they wouldn’t even be in the time abyss, or at least not for this long. In another life her son’s home – her home, for a short time – won't be attacked by invading forces to the point where Keith himself will have to face them. 

 

If she lives to the point where the blade’s glow blackens completely, she doesn’t know what she’ll do with herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I saw some post somewhere about how Krolia would have been off of Earth during the finale of s7 and I went "Oh god, that's terrible. I have to write that."
> 
> Sorry for the hiatus! I've been busy with zines and school, but I'm back and angsty :3

**Author's Note:**

> cry with me over this family on tumblr:
> 
> babykeithsmullet (my VLD-only sideblog)  
> ghiblireys (main multifandom)


End file.
